Category Archives: Commercial

After hours (spread over weeks) I come to the conclusion that there is a lot of potential to improve the documentation of card readers (but I doubt the card reader vendors will do it) and of the pcsc documentation. It is not easy to arrive at a point where you understand everything. The compatibility list does not help much, as the card readers are partly past their end of life and the models which replace them are not listed. Respectively the one I bought does not support all the features I need. I even ported the driver to FreeBSD (not committed, I wanted to test everything first) and a lot of stuff works, but one critical part is that I can not store a certificate on the crypto card as the card reader or the driver does not support extended APDUs (needed to transfer more than 255 bytes to the card reader).

I have a HOWTO regarding creating keys on a openpgp v2 card and how to use this key with ssh on FreeBSD (or any other unix-like OS which can run pcsc)

I have a card reader which does not support extended APDUs

I want to make sure what I write in the HOWTOs is also suitable for the use with Windows / PuTTY

it seems Windows needs a certificate and not only a key when using the Windows CAPI (using the vendor supplied card reader driver) in PuTTY-CSC (works at work with a USB token)

the pcsc pkcs11 Windows DLL is not suitable yet for use on Windows 8 64bit

I contacted the card reader vendor if the card reader or the driver is the problem regarding the extended APDUs

I found problems in gpg4win / pcsc on Windows 8

I have send some money to the developers of gpg4win to support their work (if you use gnupg on Windows, try to send a few units of money to them, the work stagnated as they need to spend their time for paid work)

So either I need a new card reader, or have to wait for an update of the linux driver of the vendor… which probably means it may be a lot faster to buy a new card reader. When looking for one with at least a PIN pad, I either do not find anything which is listed as supported by pcsc on the vendor pages (it is incredible how hard it is to navigate the websites of some companies… a lot of buzzwords but no way to get to the real products), or they only list updated models where I do not know if they will work.

When I have something which works with FreeBSD and Windows, I will publish all the HOWTOs here at once.

One way I want to focus on here (because it is the way I want to use at home), is to store the keys on a crypto card. I did some research for suitable crypto cards and found one which is called Feitian PKI Smartcard, and one which is called OpenPGP card. The OpenPGP card also exists in a USB version (basically a small version of the card is already integrated into a small USB card reader).

The spec of the OpenPGP card tells that it supports RSA keys upto 3072 bits, but there are reports that it is able to handle RSA keys upto 4096 bits (you need to have at least GPG 2.0.18 to handle that big keys on the crypto card). It looks to me like the card is not handle DSA (or ECDSA) cards. There are only slots for upto 3 keys on it.

If I go this way, I would also need a card reader. It seems a class 3 one (hardware PIN pad and display) would be the most “future-proof” way to go ahead. I found a Reiner SCT cyberJack secoder card reader, which is believed to be supported by OpenSC and seems to be a good balance between cost and features of the Reiner SCT card readers.

If anyone reading this can suggest a better crypto card (keys upto 4096 bits, more than 3 slots, and/or DSA/ECDSA support), or a better card reader, or has any practical experience with any of those components on FreeBSD, please add a comment.

The recent Phoronix benchmark which compared a release candidate of FreeBSD 9 with Oracle Linux Server 6.1Â created a huge discussion in the FreeBSDmailinglists. The reason was that some people think the numbers presented there give a wrong picture of FreeBSD. Partly because not all benchmark numbers are presented in the most prominent page (as linked above), but only at a different place. This gives the impression that FreeBSD is inferior in this benchmark while it just puts the focus (for a reason,Â according to some people)Â on a different part of the benchmark (to beÂ more specific, blogbenchÂ is doing disk reads and writesÂ in parallel, FreeBSD gives higher priority to writes than to reads, FreeBSD 9 outperforms OLSÂ 6.1 in the writesÂ while OLSÂ 6.1 shines with the reads, and only the reads are presentedÂ on the first page). Other complaints are that it is toldÂ that the default install was used (in this case UFS as the FS), when it was not (ZFS as the FS).

The author of the PhoronixÂ article participated in parts of the discussion and asked for specific improvement suggestions. A FreeBSD committerÂ seems to be alreadyÂ workingÂ to get some issues resolved. What I do not like personally, is that the article is not updated with a remark that some things presented do not reflect the reality and a retest is necessary.

As there was much talk in the threadÂ but not much obvious activity from our side to resolveÂ some issues, I started to improve the FreeBSD wiki page about benchmarkingÂ so that we are able to point to it in case someone wants to benchmark FreeBSD. Others already chimed in and improved some things too. It is far from perfect, some more eyes â€” and more importantly some more fingers which add content â€” are needed. Please go to the wiki page and try to help out (if you are afraid to write something in the wiki, please at least tell your suggestions on a FreeBSD mailinglist so that others can improve the wiki page).

What we need too, is a wiki page about FreeBSD tuning (a first step would be to take the man-page and convert it into a wiki page, then to improve it, and then to feed back the changes to the man-page while keeping the wiki page to be able to cross reference parts from the benchmarking page).

I already told about this in the thread about the PhoronixÂ benchmark: everyone is welcome to improve the situation. Do not talk, write something. No matter if it is an improvement to the benchmarking page, tuning advise, or a tool which inspects the system and suggests some tuning. If you want to help in the wiki, create a FirstnameLastnameÂ account andÂ ask a FreeBSDÂ comitterÂ for write access.

A while ago (IIRC we have to think in months or even years) there was some framework for automatic FreeBSD benchmarking. Unfortunately the author run out of time. The framework was able to install a FreeBSD system on a machine, run some specified benchmark (not much benchmarks where integrated), and then install another FreeBSD version to run the same benchmark, or to reinstall the same version to run another benchmark. IIRC there was also some DB behind which collected the results and maybe there was even some way to compare them. It would be nice if someone could get some time to talk with the author to get the framework and set it up somewhere, so that we have a controlled environment where we can do our own benchmarks in an automatic and repeatable fashion with several FreeBSD versions.

Today I was looking into the OpenSourceÂ licenses which are displayedÂ for Android (2.3.4). There are several files which come with a BSD license.

During looking at it, I noticed that the libmÂ hasÂ the copyright of several FreeBSD people. I did not hadÂ an in-deepÂ look if this is because they took the FreeBSD libm, or if this is because parts of the FreeBSD libmÂ where adopted by other BSD projects.

What I noticed is, that some special characters are not displayed correctly. For example the nameÂ Dag-ErlingÂ SmÃ¸rgravÂ looks mangled in the display of the license inside the phone (I hope it is displayedÂ better in my blog). His name is not the only problem case, there are also other characters which are not rendered as expected.

Today I was looking into the OpenSourceÂ licenses which are displayedÂ for Android (2.3.4). There are several files which come with a BSD license.

During looking at it, I noticed that the libmÂ hasÂ the copyright of several FreeBSDpeople. I did not hadÂ an in-deepÂ look if this is because they took the FreeBSD libm, or if this is because parts of the FreeBSD libmÂ where adopted by other BSD projects.

What I noticed is, that some special characters are not displayed correctly. For example the nameÂ Dag-ErlingÂ SmÃ¸rgravÂ looks mangled in the display of the license inside the phone (I hope it is displayedÂ better in my blog). His name is not the only problem case, there are also other characters which are not rendered as expected.

Today I have read an interesting investigation and problem analysis from Jim Gettys.

It is a set of articles he wrote over several months and is not finished writing as of this writing (if you are deeply interested in it go and read them, the most interesting ones are from December and January and the comments to the articles are also contributing to the big picture). Basically he is telling that a lot of network problems users at home (with ADSL/cable or WLAN) experienceÂ are because buffers in the network hardware or in operating systems are too big. He also proposes workarounds until this problem is attacked by OS vendors and equipment manufacturers.

Basically he is telling the network congestion algorithms can not do their work good, because the network buffers which are too big come into the way of their work (not reporting packet loss timely enough respectively try to not lose packets in situations where packet loss would be better because it would trigger action in the congestion algorithms).

He investigated the behavior of Linux, OS X and Windows (the system he had available). I wanted to have a quick look at the situation in FreeBSD regarding this, but it seems at least with my network card I am not able to see/find the corresponding size of the buffers in drivers in 30 seconds.

I think it would be very good if this issue is investigated in FreeBSD, and apart from maybe taking some action in the source also write some section for the handbook which explains the issue (one problem here is, that there are situations where you want/need to have such big buffers and as such we can not just downsize them) and how to benchmark and tune this.

Unfortunately I even have too much on my plate to even further look into this. I hope one of the network people in FreeBSD is picking up the ball and starts playing.

Brendan Gregg of Sun Oracle fame made a good explanation how to visualize latency to get a better understanding of what is going on (and as such about how to solve bottlenecks). I have seen all this already in various posts in his blog and in the Analytics package in an OpenStorage presentation, but the ACM article summarizes it very good.

Unfortunately Analytics is AFAIK not available in OpenSolaris, so we can not go out and adapt it for FreeBSD (which would probably require to port/implement some additional dtrace stuff/probes). I am sure something like this would be very interesting to all those companies which use FreeBSD in an appliance (regardless if it is a storage appliance like NetApp, or a network appliance like a Cisco/Juniper router, or anything else which has to perform good).